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That reminded me of an e-mail I received a couple weeks ago, suggesting that someone should start a blog called, “What’s Eric Saying?” As this correspondent explained it, all you need to do is read Topol’s Twitter stream to know where health IT and the practice of medicine are headed. I checked it out. It’s true.

Meanwhile, Mostashari added some truisms himself this morning. “Med speed is slow. Tech speed is fast,” he said, apparently paraphrasing current TEDMED owner Jay Walker. Then, speaking as a physician, Mostashari said, “Most of what determines our outcomes isn’t what happens in our office.” Which is kind of what Topol has been trying to get across for several years.

If only the financial incentives would encourage care outside the office, we might be getting somewhere. It’s starting to happen, but, as it says above, med speed is slow.

Yes, things do change pretty fast in health IT. I realized this over the past couple of weeks when I updated my database of contacts by scanning and categorizing about 300 business cards I’ve collected over the past 2½ years. (I really let things pile up this time. Now that my desk is reasonably clean, I hope I never do that again. I can claim extraordinary circumstances in 2012, but that only accounts for one year.)

What really struck me, in addition to the amount of time I let this slide, is the number of new categories I had to create in the database and the number I had to modify. My contacts go back to when I started covering healthcare in October 2000, and I’ve had a card scanner for at least 10 years. I had “PDA” and “ASP” as two of the choices until I changed them to “smartphone” and “SaaS” within the last couple of years.

Here are a few terms that are new in my database since I last did a thorough update, probably early in 2011:

accountable care

analytics (as opposed to data mining)

business incubator

remote monitoring

I also can’t believe I didn’t have CIO as a category until this month.

Some of the changes reflect a shift in what I’ve covered, but some terms are pretty new. Did you know what accountable care was prior to 2010? Were there many business incubators or accelerators in healthcare before Rock Health started up in 2011? I don’t know of any.

By the same token, when was the last time anyone talked about a PDA, an ASP or RHIO? Perhaps it’s just been a change in semantics, but the real change has been in the technology and the focus of healthcare executives. (Come to think of it, some of the tags on this blog are a bit out of date. I’ve been blogging since 2004. You get the picture.)

On another note, thanks to Healthcare Scene guru John Lynn, who hosts this blog for me, for, without my prompting, promoting the fact that I’m cycling 100 miles in an event called the Wrigley Field Road Tour on Sunday, Aug. 25, for the third year in a row. The ride supports an organization called World Bicycle Relief, which provides specially made bikes to remote villages in Africa so people who are otherwise without transportation can get to school and jobs. It also benefits Chicago Cubs Charities, which funds a number of youth programs in the Chicago area. (The ride’s co-founders are World Bicycle Relief founder F.K. Day, whose family owns bike component maker Sram, and Todd Ricketts, whose family controls the Cubs.)

Within the last two weeks, I suddenly got a surge of donations from people within the health IT community, and I couldn’t figure out why. Now I know. If you’d like to help, here’s my fundraising page.

One unexpected donor was Todd Stein of healthcare PR firm Amendola Communications. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that he is fundraising to help offset medical expenses of a colleague whose 3-year-old son faces surgery for a brain tumor. From that page:

Kathy C., a friend and colleague (who has always been the first to help but the last to ask for help and so wants to remain anonymous) is a single mother of three children all under the age of 7. Her 3-year-old son “James” was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor.

The surgery will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, Kathy has a $10,000 deductible on her health insurance plan and stands to pay out of pocket costs that are estimated at three times that amount. James is going in for the first of a series of surgeries this week and paying tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses is a hardship for anyone, especially a hard working single mother of three young children.

Please keep Kathy and James in your prayers and give whatever you can to support their urgent need. Just giving up a daily coffee for one week and giving that amount would make a world of difference.

And now, it’s just about 5 o’clock here in Chicago, so please enjoy your weekend.

I’m about to head to the airport for my flight to Las Vegas and HIMSS12. As has become customary before each year’s HIMSS conference, I sat down with H. Stephen Lieber, CEO of HIMSS, this past week to discuss the state of health IT and what to expect at the big event.

The timing of this interview was interesting. We spoke Wednesday morning at the new HIMSS office in downtown Chicago, one day after CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner told a gathering of American Medical Association leaders that federal officials were re-examining the Oct. 1, 2013, deadline for adopting ICD-10 coding, and one day before HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made it official that there would be a delay.

Meanwhile, the whole health IT universe had been expecting HHS to release its proposed rules for Stage 2 of “meaningful use” of electronic health records this past week. That didn’t happen. Monday is a federal holiday, so I don’t think we will hear anything until at least Tuesday, which, coincidentally, happens to be the first day of the HIMSS conference. As if we don’t have enough to keep us occupied in the next few days.

The recording is a little fuzzy. I’m not really sure what created the echo and the background noise, since we were in a dedicated interview room, one of the nice features at the new HIMSS digs. Radio interference perhaps? That happened to me a couple years ago in the old HIMSS office on East Ohio Street. Just pretend you’re listening on AM radio or something.

1:00 Logistics of HIMSS12 in Las Vegas after the venue change
2:00 Why the Venetian-Palazzo-Sands might work better than the Las Vegas Convention Center
2:55 Why the conference starts on Tuesday this year
3:25 Massive scale of the conference
5:25 Return of Cerner and Meditech and some first-time exhibitors
7:45 mHIMSS and HIT X.0
10:15 Twitter co-founder Biz Stone keynoting and the state of social media in healthcare
12:00 Accountable care and realignment of incentives
14:15 What might be in proposed rule for Stage 2 of meaningful use
17:20 Preview of HIMSS survey of hospital readiness for meaningful use
20:30 ICD-10 readiness
25:00 Greater public awareness of health IT but continuing difficulties in communicating the finer points of healthcare reform
27:50 Mobile healthcare
31:25 The growing importance of clinical analytics

In part two of my series from month’s IBM Exchange 2011, my guest is IBM Distinguished Engineer Scott Schumacher. In this lively podcast, Schumacher discusses Watson, disease management and the concept of the “clinical hub,” which envisions bringing together clinical decision support and case management.

As with my previous podcast with IBM’s Lorraine Fernandes, I set my mic too low. I boosted the level during editing, but that introduced more background noise than I’d like. Schumacher mostly comes through nice and clear, though.

Editor’s note: This was written for a national publication, but rejected because it was too localized. I have permission to post it here. Don’t get used to me writing a lot of news stories for this blog.

Healthcare business process services firm Anthelio Healthcare Solutions will open a “center of excellence” in or near Detroit, a move that could bring thousands of IT-related jobs to an economically depressed area. The Dallas-based company, formerly known as PHNS, also announced that it is working with community colleges across Michigan to develop and hire in-state talent.

“This is mostly about private industry stepping up,” Anthelio Chairman and CEO Richard S. Garnick said. “These are not part-time or short-term jobs,” Garnick said. He added that the company did not receive any government assistance or subsidies for this expansion.

The 50,000-square-foot center of excellence will serve as a “physical location that clusters skills and expertise,” Garnick explained. Anthelio has not chosen the actual site yet, but Garnick said the company has narrowed its options to two, one in Detroit proper and one in an unspecified suburb.

There will be some consolidation of services from Anthelio offices in Detroit and Flint, Mich., but most of the people working at the center of excellence will be new hires, Garnick said, and the company would keep the existing locations open. The two current Michigan offices help Anthelio support major clients McLaren Health Care Corp. in Flint, and Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanguard Health Systems, owner of Detroit Medical Center.

Garnick did not indicate exactly how many employees Anthelio was looking for, but said it was in the thousands. “We are hiring people as we speak,” Garnick said. He added that Anthelio will support tuition reimbursement for new employees who are completing health IT training in programs of three to six months at community colleges. Current Anthelio employees also are eligible for tuition assistance.

The company is looking for expertise in health information management, computer-assisted coding, business process improvement, and other back-end healthcare functions, according to the CEO. “We have a broad set of needs, he said.

Last week, Anthelio announced a partnership with speech recognition technology vendor MedQuist Holdings to improve clinical documentation for healthcare providers and promote computer-assisted coding. The Michigan center for excellence will handle some of this work, according to Garnick, as well as analytics-related activities with another Anthelio partner, OptumInsight, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that was formerly known as Ingenix.

Much of the ramp-up is intended to prepare clients for the October 2013 transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding. Garnick likened the change to the scope of preparations IT departments made for Y2K more than a decade ago, with one major difference. “It doesn’t end on Jan. 1, 2000,” Garnick noted. “This will be the new platform for reimbursement for healthcare.

Free Healthcare IT Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Get all the latest Health IT updates from Neil Versel for FREE!

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